FRANK BOWLING | Jennifer's Ear

Colour: The colour in the printed catalogue is fairly accurate, although it fails to fully convey the textural qualities of the work and the irridescent nature of the paint. Condition: This work is in very good condition. All collaged elements are stable. Very close inspection reveals some drying cracks in places throughout the composition with some associated specks of loss to the centre of the composition.
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Jennifer’s Ear spectacularly exhibits Frank Bowling’s celebrated articulation of abstraction through mixed media as well as his vibrant use of saturated pigments in striking chromatic variations. The splendid thickness and depth of the materials on the surface of the canvas create a quasi-sculptural relief that undoubtedly challenges the confines of traditional painting. Here the possibilities of abstraction are interrogated as Bowling finds dynamic new configurations of colour and form. The artist graduated from the Royal College of Arts in 1962, and his oeuvre is considered to be one of the most prominent to emerge from post-war British art schools. The work of the Guyana-born British artist relates aesthetically to the Abstract Expressionist and Colour Field painting of the 1940s and 1950s, and this influence is palpable in Jennifer’s Ear, where gesture, improvisation and impulse forms the core of the composition.  The upcoming, highly anticipated Frank Bowling exhibition at Tate Modern in spring 2019 has heightened interest in this exceptional artist, and will chronologically show Bowling’s artistic progression from the early 1960s to the present. The artist’s corpus of sculptural paintings will be exhibited, the selection of which undoubtedly evoke the three dimensionality of the present canvas. Bowling visually orchestrates the expressive and emotional power of colour in a manner that recalls the work of American artist Sam Gilliam, who also looks to colour field painting and lyrical abstraction throughout his dynamic repertoire. Jennifer’s Ear remains a powerful example of Bowling’s technical prowess and painterly genius, as well as his exploratory ways of applying paint by pouring, splitting and dripping—a technique that profoundly invests his canvases with both shape and weight. The artist himself asserts, “The possibilities of paint are never-ending” (Frank Bowling cited in: Imelda Barnard, ‘My Life Has Always Been About Painting’, Apollo: The International Art Magazine, online).